News tagged with pleistocene

New Zealand's kiwi may be one of the world's oddest birds – flightless, nocturnal, an enigmatic dirt digger with nostrils at the end of its long bill. But the national symbol also has a lot to tell the world about evolution ...

(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers with Universidad de la República in Uruguay has found evidence that suggests the huge size of some animals during the Pleistocene may have been one of the contributing factors to their ...

Tooth-marks on a 500,000-year-old hominin femur bone found in a Moroccan cave indicate that it was consumed by large carnivores, likely hyenas, according to a study published April 27, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ...

Famous for its deserts, arid central Asia (ACA) is one of the driest regions in the mid-latitudes and one of the main potential dust sources for the northern hemisphere. The mobilization, transportation, and deposition of ...

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected ...

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from several institutions in the U.S. has found evidence that suggests that pupfish living in Devils Hole are not nearly as ancient as has been previously assumed. In their paper published ...

The hominin record from southern Asia for the early Late Pleistocene epoch is scarce. Well-dated and well-preserved fossils older than 45,000 years that can be unequivocally attributed to Homo sapiens are lacking. In a paper ...

Pleistocene

The Pleistocene ( /ˈplaɪstəsiːn/) (symbol PS) is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek πλεῖστος (pleistos "most") and καινός (kainos "new").

The Pleistocene Epoch follows the Pliocene Epoch and is followed by the Holocene Epoch. The Pleistocene is the first epoch of the Quaternary Period or 6th epoch of the Cenozoic Era. The end of the Pleistocene corresponds with the end of the last glacial period. It also corresponds with the end of the Paleolithic age used in archaeology.

In the ICS timescale, the Pleistocene is divided into four stages or ages, the Gelasian, Calabrian, Ionian and Tarantian. All of these stages were defined in southern Europe. In addition to this international subdivision, various regional subdivisions are often used.

Before a change finally confirmed in 2009 by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the boundary between the Pleistocene and the preceding Pliocene was regarded as being at 1.806 not 2.588 million years BP; publications from the preceding years may use either definition of the period.